Rackspace said to be close to private equity buyout

Rackspace, one of the founding companies behind OpenStack, is said to be close to a deal with Apollo Global Management to bring the company private at a value of between .4 billion and billion. Rumors swirled around the company in 2014, but the company reportedly couldn’t get the price it was looking for, said to be in the neighborhood of billion.

Since then, Rackspace has changed its market strategy, exiting the commodity cloud business and focusing on “managed services”, in which customers pay for resources and for the “fanatical support” the company is known for. That “fanatical support” is now also offered for AWS and Azure. This week Rackspace also sold its Cloud Sites premium hosting business, which is separate from its cloud services and involves sites that start at $150/month, to Liquid Web for an undisclosed sum.